Already impressed with what the GeForce GTX 550 Ti can do after looking at the MSI Cyclone edition, it's now time to see what Gainward brings to the table with its highly popular Golden Sample series. This is a series that's been popular for years and in recent times we've seen them come out hard and fast offering strong cooling solutions, but more importantly fantastic out of the box overclocks that have resulted in excellent performance gains over other models. When Gainward has chosen to throw the overclock tag on a model, especially the Golden Sample one, we know it means that it is going to be strong versus other companies who have done the same and then offered us a small 10MHz increase. - TweakTown

Gainward GeForce GTX 550 Ti Golden Sample Review

Gainward today are offering us a core clock that gets in the quadruple digits and it will be interesting to see what that does for performance. Their overall cooler design is similar to what we have seen before from Gainward, but the shroud is a little different. As always though, the slick black and red combination looks really good. With an quick spin around the graphics card you will find the same 6-pin power connector we saw on the Cyclone edition. This time it's on top of the board instead of the back. Across the top, but closer to the front we have a single SLI connector which will allow to run multipe cards together for higher performance.

Gainward has always been aggressive with their Golden Sample series and they have been especially aggressive recently with these mid-range offerings like the GeForce GTX 560 Ti graphics card. This GeForce GTX 550 Ti is no different with an default core clock of 1GHz, 50MHz up on the MSI Cyclone version we looked at and 100MHz up from default settings. That increased core speed means also that shader clock has bumped to 2GHz. The good news is that Gainward hasn't chosen to ignore the memory, so boosting that above reference and the Cyclone. We see the 1GB of GDDR5 carries with it an 4400MHz effective memory clock.

Gainward today upped the ante by offering us an 1GHz clock out of the gate that gives really nice performance overall at mid-range widescreen depending on the age of the games or the amount of detail you want to run at. Not only have they chosen to increase the core, they've also given a nice bump to the memory clock which helps push performance up again, and what you end up with is a card that simply performs well at the above mentioned resolutions. While the graphics card does indeed run quite warm at a little over 70°C, but that's due to the decision for Gainward to opt for a near silent cooling solution which works nicely.

The heat might be considered a little warm for a mid-range card like this, but the model has a tolerance for over 90°C and we can't see any way the card would get there. Also, in another case with some structured air flow that temperature would probably drop down a little so would other cards, and that's something you need to take into consideration. If you're looking for something that will let you game at mid-range widescreen in an almost silent environment, though this is a very good option. Aggressive pricing from NVIDIA on the series and its overall performance help the series look very attractive and will persuade quite some buyers.

The extra length that Gainward has gone to by offering an 1GHz video card and a cooler that runs at near silence is what makes this a stand out model. We have got something a little different to the previous GeForce GTX 550 Ti we looked at and depending on what exactly you're after, this could well be a better choice.